But inside that perfect bucolic moment, there is another reality at work, one that doesn’t stand examination in the harsh light of day. The rain ditches along that same road are strewn with bottles, beer cans, and raw garbage. Under the bayou’s rain-dented surface lie discarded paint and motor-oil cans, containers of industrial solvents, rubber tires, and construction debris that will never biologically degrade.
Across the drawbridge from two of the most lovely historical homes in Louisiana is a trailer slum that probably has no equivalent outside the Third World. The juxtaposition seems almost contrived, like a set in a Marxist documentary meant to discredit capitalistic societies.
But as I drive this road in the sunset, I try not to dwell upon the problems of the era in which we live. I try to remember the Louisiana of my youth and to convince myself that we can rehabilitate the land and ourselves and regain the past. It’s a debate which I seldom win.
It was dark when I came out of the meeting at the church, the wind cool off the Gulf, the clouds in the south veined with lightning that gave off no sound. An elderly black man from the congregation came up to me in the parking lot. “That guy find you?” he said.
“Which guy?” I asked.
“He was looking at your truck and ax if it was yours. He said he t’ought it was for sale.” The elderly man was named Lemuel Melancon and he had muttonchop sideburns and wore a white shirt and tie.
“It has been, but I took the sign out of the window when I drove here. This was a white or black guy?” I said.
“White. Maybe he’ll come back. Pretty good meeting tonight, huh?”
“Yeah, it was. See you Sunday, Lemuel.”
I DROVE BACK to New Iberia, past a sugar mill on the far side of the bayou and through cane fields and a rural slum at the city limits, then I crossed the drawbridge onto Old Spanish Trail and entered the long tunnel of oaks that led to my home on East Main. The street behind me was empty, serpentine lines of dead leaves scudding across the asphalt.
I parked the truck under my porte-cochere and replaced the FOR SALE placard in the back window. I unlocked the front door of my house, then paused in the gentle sweep of wind across the gallery. Normally, when Snuggs heard my truck, he ran to the front, particularly when he had not been fed. But there was no sign of him. I picked up his pet bowl and went inside, then looked for him in the backyard. Tripod, my three-legged raccoon, was on top of his hutch, staring at me.
“How’s it hangin’, Tripod? Have you seen Snuggs tonight?” I said.
I patted his head and smoothed down the fur on his back and gave his tail a little tug. He rubbed his muzzle against my forearm.
It was balmy inside the trees, the night alive with wind. A tugboat was passing on the bayou, its wake lit by its running lights. Decayed leaves and pecan husks that were soft with mold crunched under my shoes as I walked back toward the house. Dry thunder pealed slowly across the sky, then I heard Tripod climb down the side of his hutch and jump heavily inside.
“What is it, ’Pod? Thunder got you scared?” I said.
I returned to his hutch and started to lift him up. The tree limbs overhead flickered with lightning, then I heard a sound or felt a presence that should not have been there, a twig snapping under the sole of a shoe, an inhalation of breath, like a man oxygenating his blood in preparation for an expenditure of enormous physical energy.
I set Tripod down and straightened up, just in time to see a man with a nylon stocking over his face swing a two-by-four at the side of my head. I caught part of the blow with my arm, but not well enough. I felt my scalp split and wood splinters bite into my ear and my cheek. I crashed against the hutch, grabbing at the air, just as he hit me again, this time across the neck and shoulders.
I tried to get to my feet, but he kicked me in the ribs with the point of his shoe, then in the armpit, and once right across the mouth. I tumbled backwards, trying to get the hutch between me and the man with the two-by-four. I could hear Tripod’s paws skittering on the floor and wire sides of his hutch. I grabbed a handful of dirt and leaves, threw it blindly at my attacker’s face, got my pocketknife loose from my pants, and pulled the blade open.
But when I stood erect, I was alone, the yard suddenly gone silent, as though I had stepped outside of time and the world around me had been reconfigured without my consent. Blood was leaking from my hairline and there was a bitter, coppery taste, like wet pennies, in my mouth. Tripod had scampered up into the live oak above his hutch and was peering down at me, his body trembling.
I had no idea where my attacker had gone. I walked off balance toward the house, as though a piece of membrane were torn loose inside my head. In the kitchen I had to sit down to punch in a 911 call on the telephone, then had to spit the blood out of my mouth into a paper towel before I could tell the dispatcher what had happened.
In less than a minute I heard a siren coming hard down East Main. I looked through the kitchen window and saw Snuggs sitting on the outside sill, framed against the philodendron, pawing at the screen to come inside.
THE EMERGENCY-ROOM physician at Iberia General kept me overnight, and when I woke, the early-morning sun looked like pink smoke inside the oak trees. A nurse’s aide brought breakfast to me on a tray, then wheeled me down the corridor for an X ray. When I returned to the room, Helen Soileau was sitting by the window, reading the Baton Rouge Advocate. The main story above the fold was about another abduction in Baton Rouge, this time the wife of a state environmental quality official who was serving time in a federal prison. Helen folded the paper and set it on the windowsill. “Bad night, huh, bwana?” she said.
“Not really,” I said, sitting down on the side of the bed.
“They going to kick you loose?”
“Soon as the doc looks at my X ray.”
“We couldn’t find the board your attacker used, so we got nothing we can lift latents off. You think he was the same guy asking about your truck at the church?”
“Maybe.”
“More specifically, you think it was one of those deputies—Shockly or Pitts?”
“Who knows?”
“I ran both of them and got a hit on Pitts. Four years back he was charged with planting coke on some Cambodians. They got pulled over at a traffic stop and their SUV and thirty thousand in cash seized. They’d saved the money to buy a restaurant in Baton Rouge.”
“How’d Pitts get out of it?” I asked.
“Gave evidence against the other cops. Did you say a black man at your church got a look at the guy who was hanging around your truck?”
“He talked to him.”
“I got a mug shot of Pitts for him to look at.”
I nodded and waited for her to go on. But she seemed distracted, as though several things were on her mind at once. She got up from her chair and gazed out the window. The tops of her arms were round and thick, her back stiff. “Did you read the story in the Advocate about another abduction in Baton Rouge?” she asked.
“Yeah, I saw it.”
“I think the perp is using Baton Rouge as his personal hunting reserve. But I don’t think he’s from there,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I talked with Baton Rouge P.D. The DNA on the girl in Grand Coteau was just matched to DNA on at least five other victims.”
“Five?”
“The locals didn’t know they had a serial predator on their hands. They screwed up. It happens. I think the guy has deliberately confined himself to Baton Rouge for years, but he saw the black girl at the cemetery by herself and couldn’t resist the opportunity. I think he lives in a small town, maybe in Acadiana, and gets his jollies in Baton Rouge.”
“Why you telling me all this?”
“You still want your shield back?” she asked.
TWO DAYS LATER after the swelling had gone out of my jaw and my mouth no longer bled when I ate, I reported to my old job at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I was assigned a corner office on the second floor, one that allowed me a
view of the cemetery, trees that lined the railway tracks, and the ivy-scaled brick facades of several buildings that, with a little imagination at twilight, provided a glimpse back into nineteenth-century America.
The previous night I had laid out a tie and sports coat, shined my shoes, and pressed a pair of slacks and a soft, long-sleeve blue shirt, pretending I had no anxiety about returning to a job for which I was perhaps too old or, worse, simply unfit to do well. Now, standing in my office by myself, the wire baskets on the desk empty, I felt like a guest who has said good night at a party but comes back later because he has nowhere else to go. But all morning uniformed deputies and plainclothes detectives stopped by and shook hands, and it felt wonderful.
At noon I checked out a cruiser and drove down the bayou to Jeanerette and the community of shacks along the back road where Lemuel Melancon lived. He was sitting in a rocker on his tiny gallery, his body dappled with sunlight that fell through a pecan tree in his front yard. The wind was blowing in the cane behind his house, but his tin roof shimmered with heat.
I showed him front and profile photos of Billy Joe Pitts. Pitts was wearing a starched sports shirt printed with a tropical design, the fabric stretched tight against the expansion of his chest. The booking time on the photo strip was 11:16 p.m., but Pitts’s face showed no expression, not even fatigue, like the head of an unrepentant criminal upon a platter. “Is this the guy who was looking at my truck?” I asked.
Lemuel held the strip close to his face, then handed it back to me. “Could be. But it was dark. I can’t see good no more, me,” he said.
“It’s important, Lemuel.”
He took another look and shook his head. “What’d this guy do?” he asked.
“Helped plant cocaine on some Cambodians so their vehicle and cash could be confiscated.”
“I ain’t following you.”
“He’s a cop. You see him again, you let me know.”
Lemuel leaned back in his chair and looked out at the road, suddenly disconnected from me and a conversation involving a corrupt white police officer.
“Lemuel?” I said.
“Got to clean my li’l house now. Dust keep blowing out of the yard t’rew the screen, dirtying up my whole house. Just cain’t keep it clean, no matter what I do. See you another time, Dave.”
WE LIVE IN the New South. Legal segregation has slipped into history; the Klan has moved west, into white supremacist compounds, where they feel safe from the people whom they fear; and in Mississippi black state troopers ticket white motorists.
But memories can be long, fear is fear, and race is at the heart of virtually every political issue in the states of the Old Confederacy, particularly in the realignment of the two national political parties. As I drove back to New Iberia, the fields of early sugar cane rippling in the breeze, the buttercups blooming along the rain ditches, I wondered about the memories of violence and injustice that my friend Lemuel Melancon would probably never share with me. But they obviously lived inside him, and I knew that as a white man it was presumptuous of me to ask that he set aside the cautionary instincts that had allowed him to be a survivor.
This was St. Mary Parish, historically a fiefdom where a few individuals controlled mind-boggling amounts of wealth. In the 1970s a group of Catholic Worker nuns tried to organize the sugar cane workers here. Some of the blacks and poor whites who listened to them discovered they had thirty minutes to move their belongings out of their houses.
A journey to the bedside of a dying school chum had led me back to the disappearance years ago of Ida Durbin. Had not two rogue deputies, Shockly and Pitts, tried to turn dials on me, my revisiting of a bad experience in my youth would probably have ended there, at a Baptist hospital, in a backward, piney-woods parish in central Louisiana.
But that parish, its sawmills, corporate cotton and soybean fields, its catfish farms, along with its politicians and sheriff’s department, had always been owned by the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish.
Unconsciously I touched the stitches in my scalp where my attacker had clubbed me with a two-by-four. Was he sent by the Chalonses, over the disappearance or death of a prostitute in 1958? No, that was my old class-conscious paranoia at work, I told myself.
I kept telling myself that all the way back to New Iberia.
THAT EVENING, Clete Purcel picked me up at the house and we had dinner at a bar-and-grill that served food on a deck overlooking the bayou. It was dusk, the western sky ribbed with strips of orange cloud, the turn bridge on the bayou open for a barge. Clete had been quiet all evening. “I think I need to make a home call on this Pitts character,” he said.
“Nope,” I said.
“Nothing dramatic. Maybe drive him out to a quiet spot and give him a chance to get some things off his chest.”
“Clete—”
“Nobody messes with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. Every lowlife in New Orleans always understood that, big mon. This dickhead doesn’t get slack because he’s a cop.”
Some people at the next table stared at us.
“I have no evidence Pitts was the guy,” I said.
“You know he was the guy.”
“Maybe.”
“Trust me, I’ll get the ‘maybe’ out of the equation. Quit worrying. He’ll probably thank me for it,” he said. He took a bite out of his po’boy sandwich. “These fried oysters are supposed to be aphrodisiacs, did you know that?”
Talking with Clete Purcel about personal restraint or reasonable behavior was like a meteorologist telling an electrical storm it shouldn’t come to town. But I couldn’t be mad at Clete. He was the first person to whom I always took my problems, and in truth his violence, recklessness, and vigilantism were simply the other side of my own personality. I felt his gaze wander over my face and the stitches I had tried to comb my hair over.
“Will you stop that?” I said.
“What’s your brother say about all this?” he said.
“Haven’t talked with him about it.”
He looked at me.
“He’s got his own problems,” I said.
“Jimmie the Gent is a stand-up guy. Why not treat him like one?” Clete said.
Years ago my brother had taken a bullet for me and lost an eye. I didn’t feel like cluttering up his life with any more grief or the detritus of 1958. I started to tell Clete that when my cell phone rang. The caller number was Helen Soileau’s.
“We got a floater out by the St. Martin line,” she said. “It may be the wife of that DEQ official who’s in Seagoville. We’ve got personal effects, but I don’t think we’ll get a visual ID.”
“That bad?”
“The guy who did this isn’t human.”
“None of them are,” I replied.
“Better see the vic,” she said.
CHAPTER
5
THE CRIME SCENE was only ten minutes from the bar-and-grill on the bayou. But the images there belonged in a medieval painting of a netherworld that should have existed only in the imagination. On a dead-end dirt road lined with garbage was a black pond spiked by gum trees. The sky was tormented by birds, the sun a gush of red on the horizon. The victim lay on her back, her torso half in the water. I felt my stomach constrict when Helen shined her flashlight on the woman’s face.
“Get this. The sonofabitch hung her purse in a tree,” she said. “Money, car keys, driver’s license, credit cards, everything was in there.”
“Her husband was with the Department of Environmental Quality?”
“Yeah, he was taking juice from a couple of petrochemical guys. So maybe this isn’t the Baton Rouge serial killer.”
The coroner, Koko Hebert, had just arrived. He was a gelatinous, cynical man, a sweaty, foul-smelling chain smoker, given to baggy clothes, tropical shirts, and a trademark Panama hat. I always suspected a Rotarian lay hidden inside his enormous girth and wheezing breath and jaded manner, but, if so, he hid it well. He leaned over with a penlight and stared down at the body. “Jes
us Christ,” he said.
“Got any speculations?” Helen said.
“Yeah, her face looks like a flowerpot after a truck ran over it,” he said.
Helen gave me a look. “Are those ligations around her throat?” she asked.
He made a pained face, as though he were weighing a great decision. “Could be. But those knots could be the nodules associated with bubonic plague. Been a couple of outbreaks in East Texas. Squirrels and pack rats can carry it sometimes. You didn’t touch anything here, did you?” he said. He held Helen’s eyes somberly, then his mouth broke at the corners and his breath wheezed like air escaping from a ruptured tire. “Ligations, shit. The guy who did this had a boner on he couldn’t knock down with a baseball bat.”
“The signature on the Baton Rouge serial killings is death by strangulation,” Helen said.
But the coroner ignored her and motioned for two paramedics to bag up the body.
“Did you hear me?” she said.
He stared into space, his eyes askance, a manufactured look of pensiveness on his face. “Our killer is not into methodology,” he said.
“Say again?” Helen said.
“Our killer is a horny prick who loves beating the shit out of people. He doesn’t care how he does it. Are we all better now?” Koko said.
Helen’s face blanched. She started to speak, but I placed my hand on her shoulder. Her muscles felt like a bag of rocks. We watched Koko Hebert walk toward an ambulance, its emergency flashers blinking. It was hot and breathless inside the trees, and the air smelled of stagnant water and leaves that had turned black in damp shade.
“Blow him off. He’s an unhappy fat man who tries to make other people as miserable as he is,” I said.
She slapped a mosquito on her cheek and looked at the smear of blood on her hand. The paramedics lifted the body heavily out of the water, their latex-gloved hands sinking deep into the tissue. “Wrap it up for me, Pops?” Helen said.